by Patrick Lane
His would be the first body of his family buried in the New World. If he had children by Chunhua they would outlive him by many years. He had thought at times of having his ashes scattered on the Fraser River where it emptied out into the sea in Vancouver. The North Thompson River at his feet flowed into the Fraser. Each time he came to rest on the tree by the river it pleased him to think that his ashes might someday melt into this northern water.
Wang Po smiled. He had gone far away into his own death and he wondered at his concern for something that was merely the end and the beginning of suffering. His body would die and he would return to go on wandering in samsara. He had not lived a peaceful life and even on this day he had indulged in the pipe, his intoxication a continuing betrayal of precepts of the Buddha. So he would pay for that in his reincarnation, just as he would pay for the Japanese officer he killed in Shanghai who’d murdered what Wang Po had thought was a child.
The starving boy had been down by the docks at the door of a bar in the alley where the soldiers came out to piss. The child had stood in the officer’s way when he stepped from the bar and the officer had calmly reached out, turned the child around with his left arm, took out his knife, and cut the boy’s throat. He remembered how the officer didn’t get any blood on the arm of his uniform. The death had been swift and Wang Po had known instantly that the officer had to have killed many times before for him to so artfully avoid staining himself. It was the casual display of the officer’s efficiency that shocked Wang Po, who had seen many terrible crimes in his time in Shanghai. The officer’s own death had been as quick.
What he remembered most was not the way the officer had killed the child, and not the officer’s own death by Wang Po’s hands. It was after, when he looked at the boy lying in the fetid water of a plugged drain. The boy’s filthy shift, the only rag he wore, had come open when he fell and Wang Po saw his pubic hair and knew then the boy had been a man. The only thing remaining of what Wang Po would have called the man’s body were the bones and the skin that covered them. That and the thin sack of his hanging belly. When he saw the pubic hair he had wished the officer was still alive so he could kill him again except this time more slowly.
The river continued to flow and it took a few moments for Wang Po to come back to the world. He had not thought of the Japanese officer or the man the officer had murdered for a long time. Perhaps his remembering his killing the officer was a way of his killing him again and he would keep on killing him until his own death.
He wondered if knowing he was about to see Art, hear more of the first-aid man’s stories, had brought the old memory back to him. Wang Po did not regret its appearance after such a long time. Wang Po thought then of the boy at the other end of the log, but when he turned to look, Emerson was gone. He had vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.
STUNTED CEDARS ROSE UP OUT OF THE BOG by the gravel lot behind the cookhouse. Joel waited a moment in the shadow of the trees and marked the stink of diesel, a pale smoke stuttering in the air from the power plant. The lights from a logging truck blared past the cookhouse. The truck headed up to the junction and by the sound of it turned north toward the new cutblock above Little Hell’s Gate where they were logging.
Was that where the pickup had gone?
Saturday log loads would arrive come dawn, the mill shut down till Monday, a logger hoping to make a few extra bucks working the weekend. Joel gazed at the dark bulk of the sawmill beyond the main-line tracks, the small two-storey station with its grey, weather-burned walls, the light above the short platform by the tracks smouldering with a fitful glow. The freight out of Kamloops would roll through soon and the Express just after dawn. The windows in the station were dark now, the agent and his family asleep.
Somewhere up on the mountainside a machine started high above the road past the shacks where the Sikhs lived. It sounded like the little D4 Cat the company parked by the dump. A crazy night. Who the hell would be up there pushing garbage around? Kids maybe from one of the farms fooling around.
Joel knew Art went to Wang Po’s room most weekend nights and always after he’d worked on someone who’d been injured. McAllister’s wife had sounded like she was hurt bad. Art would be looking to puff on that pipe of Wang Po’s, the one he called his forgetting smoke. Joel asked him once why he called it forgetting and Art said it was because he didn’t want to remember what he’d forgotten and the opium took him to a place where nothing was.
Walking out of the shadows he crossed over the rough, bladed ground to the back of the cookhouse. He went in, closing the screen door quietly behind him. Thirty loaves of bread cooled along the counter in the kitchen. The bread hadn’t been long from the ovens and Joel breathed deep, the rich smell turning his belly over. He listened at the stairs leading down to the basement where Wang Po lived. Art was down there. Joel could hear their words moving in the dark.
Joel took a loaf from the rack and tore it lengthways with his hands, the white bread breaking open with a fluff of steam. With a butcher knife from the block, he smeared each side with real butter and not the margarine that Wang Po put out on the tables for the crew. He took both chunks to the basement doorway, sat down on the top step, and began to eat, the bread pulp wet and thick, the butter sweet in his mouth and nose.
As he ate, he listened as a word rose like a single soft link of chain from the square of yellow light in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs: “Godelieve.”
The name was one Art had said before on other nights in Wang Po’s room with its one light hanging from a twisted wire, the yellow glow barely reaching into the corners of the room. Joel slid down to the bottom steps so he could hear better. He could see Wang Po now. The cook smiled at him, but Joel couldn’t see Art. He was hidden behind the swung-open door. Joel breathed the smell of opium as it melted in the air around him, listening as Art talked, his voice slow and sometimes stumbling over the spaces between words.
“Tommy was the one went searching in the dark,” Art said. “The girl he found was crying. The mother kept saying: Canada? Canada? She spoke our country like it was a question. Dank u. Dank u.”
“Same old story,” Wang Po said, looking straight at the doorway. He knew Joel was listening.
Turning to the first-aid man, he said, “Listen, Art Kenning, an old poem:
The moon over the northern deserts
means nothing to the soldiers
as they listen to the thunder of the chariots.
Joel leaned forward to listen better, the bread a soft stone in his belly.
“Art, our wars,” said the cook quietly. “When are we going to let them go? Everyone is dead back there.”
But if Art heard Wang Po he didn’t show it. He wasn’t in the cookhouse basement room anymore. The whisky and opium had led him back to the flooded fields of the Scheldt peninsula.
“There was no rain in Holland. Not that night. Tommy was cutting gobbets from the pig, someone else’s hand reaching for the wet meat barely cooked.”
And a voice came out of the night and Art spoke it as she had spoken: “Dank u, Canada, dank u, dank u.”
Joel had heard him speak those same words before on other nights at Wang Po’s. Art’s worst stories always seemed to come after something bad happened. He wondered if what happened to Irene McAllister and Art having to look after it, that maybe that was what started him remembering the Holland story. The woman was Dutch and she was just saying thank you. He listened closely just like he always did. Art was in a place far from him, another world, the stories all his own.
And then Art began:
“There was no moon, only mud, the water deeper, and then the house and barn rising from nowhere. The buildings were on an island, the polders flooded by the Germans when they broke the dikes, what road there’d been had slumped into the sea. We were worn out by the skirmishes, the foraging, crazy wandering trying to find the enemy. Don’t you see? The fields were water, the road ahead gone. The fence around the house was crushed before ever w
e got to the farm, the posts and palings broken, the ground torn up by a tank that’d been there probably only a few hours before, the tread marks German, a Panzer IV.”
Joel took his hat off and moved forward so he could see better as Art’s hand lowered a whisky bottle to the floor by his boot. The bottle sat there like a small obedient animal. To him it seemed like Art’s cat begging, the small beast Art kept alive to talk to in his cabin by the river. Joel lifted the last chunk of bread and chewed on the crust at the end, the butter melted deep in the dough.
Some nights all Art seemed to have was a story. Joel loved him talking about the war and wondered if he’d ever have the chance to go and fight in one, maybe not the Germans or Japs, but maybe the Russians, and not in Holland but somewhere, maybe even here.
Art began to speak again, his voice low and monotonous, the old story from other nights, but not like it was being told tonight. As he listened, Joel felt he was inside the world Art spoke of, his Holland, his war. It was like he was trying to explain something to himself.
“The wall was blown away, part of the roof gone, the kitchen open to the night. A stump of candle burned on a small table in the middle of what was somehow still a room, plates and knives and forks arranged on the table. There were two places set, one plate was pushed back, the knife and fork crooked. And a salt shaker tipped over, the brass top gone, the white crystals strewn on the cloth, shining like crushed silver. The woman was sitting there under the clouds, her hands cupped around the candle. The spilled salt below her hands seemed eroded from her bones. Cran and Elsted were just outside the light. I don’t know where we picked them up. They were two Calgaries who’d followed us in. They’d been looking to get away from the war awhile and when they saw our tank they picked us to follow and find a hole to hide in. It’s like they knew who we were, who we were going to become. I stepped past the two of them into what was left of the kitchen. There were chunks of wall on the floor.”
Joel stepped into the light, ducking his head under the low doorway. Wang Po lay on his cot, his pipe beside him, a thread of smoke rising from the bowl. It smelled like Indian paintbrush burning on the wood stove at home, the smell of the alpine in the flowers he’d picked for his mother, her scattering them on the hot stove because she liked the scent of their smoke when they burned.
“You sit down,” Wang Po said to Joel. He pointed at the wooden chair across from Art. “You want a drink? Art Kenning has whisky in his bottle.”
“Yes.”
Wang Po smiled. “Maybe he will give you some?”
Joel nodded yes again.
“Art Kenning,” Wang Po said, his hand out, a thin bird fluttering. “Maybe the boy can have a drink, yes?”
When Art didn’t say anything, Wang looked at Joel. “Art Kenning is drunk and he smokes the poppy. Doesn’t hear me, doesn’t hear you. Hey, Art Kenning. Listen,” he said, and began to sing, so soft Joel had to lean to hear him:
I was a boy when I left home.
I come back an old man.
Art turned his head slightly and looked at the cook.
Wang Po’s laugh was kind, so soft as he sang it again, this time in Chinese, his language full of the familiar strange sounds. “You like my words?” Wang Po said. “I made them in English for you.”
Art didn’t seem to hear him. He went on with his story.
“The woman got up from the table. She peered at us out there in the dark and said for the first time our country. Canada, she said. Dank u, dank u. Her hands hung down at her sides, tiny salt crystals falling from her fingers. Her hands didn’t seem alive. Tommy came to the lip of the broken wall and stood by Cran and Elsted. He nudged Cran and they both grinned at her. Tommy was rubbing his stomach. He pointed at the empty plates and asked her if there was something to eat. The woman took six steps to where the wall used to be and took two to the side. It was like she wanted to walk through where the kitchen door used to be. Her arms were still hanging. She turned as if in wonder that the door was gone. It wasn’t there and then…and then she just walked off into the night. We didn’t try to stop her. It wasn’t like there was very far she could go. There was the barn, a bit of road, part of a field, and a cluster of trees back behind the house, what looked like part of an orchard stretching away, a kind of tumbled-looking shed out there in what was maybe a pasture. The part of it you could see was higher ground. The rest was water, an island that wasn’t there before. We’d come in past that field. What looked like a bit of vegetable garden was out there. We all watched her walk away. I remember hoping she wouldn’t return. But she had to come back unless she wanted to drown. Tommy followed her along the side of the house. He wasn’t going to let her get away anywhere even though he knew she couldn’t unless she decided to swim. Easy, Tommy, Alvin said, but Tommy didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to hear anything from Alvin.”
Wang Po spoke into the brief silence. “What happened tonight, Joel?”
“It was the sawyer. Jim McAllister,” said Joel. “His wife got cut.”
“Cut?”
Wang Po closed his eyes.
Wang Po took the pipe over to Art. He placed the stem in Art’s mouth and the first-aid man breathed the pale smoke, shaking his head slowly. He pulled on the stem as if it was a fish hook and Wang Po was trying to pull something out of his skull.
Wang Po followed Art’s head with the pipe, Art’s mouth chewing on the stem and then his teeth loosening, his lips slack as he let it go. As Wang Po swept the pipe away it drifted past Joel’s face, Joel breathing the remnant smoke.
“Alvin should’ve done something,” said Art. “He was the corporal.”
Wang Po laid the pipe on the table and picked up the whisky bottle. He poured a little into a glass.
“Here. You drink this,” he said, handing the glass to Joel. And then turning, said to Art: “Yes, my friend, he is the corporal in your story.”
There was silence and Wang Po said, “Listen. The story is beginning again.”
Wang Po settled himself on the cot. He said, “Art Kenning is having a talk with one of the ghosts. They are inside him, the ones he won’t let go.”
To Joel the cook looked like he was melting. It’s the smoke, Joel thought. I’m breathing that dragon smoke.
“Alvin shrugged when Tommy followed the Dutch woman. He told Cran and Elsted to get a big fire going. They started ripping palings from the fence. It was cold in Holland. You could smell the winter coming in on the wind from the North Sea. I watched the men tear up the fence. The candle on the table was flickering. I held my palm over the flame. The fire was a thing in my hand. I held it for a while. I didn’t mind it burning me. Cran started breaking boards over his knee and piling them like he knew how to build a fire, Elsted going back for more wood. Alvin told them to put the fire farther away from the house. That’s when Tommy came back, the woman trailing after him. He was dragging a burlap sack of potatoes, a smaller one over his shoulder clinking. The woman’s muddy skirts were hiked up her calves. Tommy was laughing. Look what I got, he said, and I knew he meant more than just potatoes. Those were bottles clinking in that small sack.”
“You want some bread?” Wang Po asked.
“Bread?”
“New bread upstairs,” said Wang Po.
Joel told him he’d already ate some.
“Listen, Art Kenning. Song from the old times. No one wrote it down. I learned it a long time ago.”
Snow in the mountains. A bitter cold.
Everywhere I look you are not there.
The wind fills the holes in the snow.
The tracks I follow are my own.
Wang Po’s song quieted Art. Joel didn’t know if Art heard the words or if it was just the sound of the cook’s voice that had calmed him. The sounds he made were high and fleeting as if the words themselves were running away.
Art reached down and picked up his glass, but it was empty. He looked at it for a moment, bewildered, and Wang Po stepped over and filled it from the bottle.
The whisky in the glass danced and Art, unable to lift it without spilling, leaned his face down to it until his mouth met the rim and then lifted the glass and his head at the same time, the whisky slipping between his lips.
“It was wet in Nanjing, Art. Everyone was dead.”
“Nanjing?” Joel asked.
“Nanjing.” Wang Po smiled as he looked at Joel. “There are many wars, boy.”
“Nanjing?”
“It was the wharf beside the Qinhuai River, everyone falling into the water. My new friend in my arms.”
“Where?”
“Nanjing.”
“Where’s Nanjing?”
“China,” said Wang Po. “Nanjing was a city in a war. Not Art’s war. There were many people dead in Nanjing. A city of the dead.”
“Do you come from there?”
“From Nanjing. A long time ago.”
“Who killed them?”
“Cipango.”
“Who?”
“The same people you call Japan.”
“We’re the ones killed the Japs,” said Joel. “We killed Germans too.”
“You are a boy,” said Wang. “You don’t know women with bayonets pushed up inside them, hands cut off, breasts cut off. You don’t know babies burning. Tanks crushing bodies for pleasure. Men with their heads in their arms, necks talking to the clouds. A cut neck farts blood. You drink whisky, okay? Happy, happy. You like, you like?” And he laughed as he turned in a circle. “Me? I’m just a crazy old Chinaman-chink. I don’t know nothing.”
“Stop,” said Joel. “That isn’t funny. You aren’t that.” He got up and poured a little more whisky into his glass. “I never knew about Nanjing before, that’s all,” he said.
“It sounds like a bell, that word,” Art said.
“Sometimes when a bell is poured it is left alone for many years before it is struck,” Wang Po said.